The Australian rural country life is normally quite beautiful (with the exception of the recent nightmare of bushfires). I live in a small town that grows citrus fruits (mostly oranges and lemons) and diary farmers. The climate is mostly temperate, and where I am doesn't get too hot or too cold. The problem is that it's quite isolated; lifestyle is very nice if you want to take it easy, but there's not many shops nor entertainment nor schools/universities around; it's about 4+ hours to drive or 1+ hour flight into the nearest city.
Practicing medicine in rural Australia is a fufilling and well paid career path, but challenging at times on your personal and professional life due to the isolation; albeit, you do get used to it. Because of this the Government struggles to keep doctors working in rural towns for the long term; most of us, do a brief stint for up to a decade (most shorter than this) and then return back to the city (because that's where most of our family are and most of us grew up in cities). I've continued on because I have a forgiving wife and I like practicing rural medicine. Out here even though you're just a Family Physician, you truly have to be the jack of all trades, because there are no other Specialists on site; so you pretty much run the hospital and learn to do a lot of things yourself. We do have the occasional Specialist who arrives once weekly to run a clinic or theatre list, and there's the helicopter that can retreive patients for $38,000 per trip (paid for by the taxpayer); so, as you can see, we're kind of on our own most of the time. Having said that, telehealth and other technologies to videoconference has greatly helped rural clinicians such as myself. The Government also kindly subsidies your ongoing CPD to ensure you mantain your upskills in critical care medicine (that is, all of us can procedurally sedate, intubate and ventlate, ultrasound, can manage obstertric emergencies, etc.), and some of my Family Med colleagues are accredited to do minor surgeries (such as appendectomies, caesarian sections, cholecestecomies, etc.).
The pay is more than enough: hospital pays you as a Staff Specialist with a base annual salary of $220,000 AUD ($155,000 USD) plus penalties and benefits and superannuation which usually works out to be another $80,000 AUD ($55,000 USD) per year; and in addition to this you get the a porportion of the Medicare billings per patient, so usually an average 15 minute consult would be about $38 per patient and you get 50% of that (the other 50% goes back to the district health service or corporate management of the clinic) so that's usually about another at least $175,000 AUD ($122,000 USD) in additional Medicare billings assuming an average of 30 patients per day for a year's work. For just a Family Physician that totals up to be about $475,000 AUD ($330,000 USD); that's quite a lot of coin to be content with, but you do have to work hard for it. I'm on-call for our small 30-bed hospital every second day, and I run clinic five and a half days a week. Thankfully the Government in recent years has recognised this risk of burnout and subsidised a physicians relieving program to allow regular rural physicians to rotate out with a city physician for a couple months each year, which is working out quite well so far.
